


Twenty-Four Problems

by Remeinhu



Category: Rabbinic and Talmudic Judaism RPF, תלמוד | Talmud
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Attempted rape/non-con (briefly implied), M/M, Psychological Trauma, Sad Ending, Talmud, Torah study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:35:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24916228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Remeinhu/pseuds/Remeinhu
Summary: When the bandit Shimon ben Lakish pursued what he thought was a beautiful woman bathing in the Jordan river, he didn't expect to find a life partner.Nor did he expect that partnership to end the way it did.
Relationships: Rabbi Yohanan ben Nappaha/Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, Rabbi Yohanan/Reish Lakish
Comments: 7
Kudos: 8





	Twenty-Four Problems

**Author's Note:**

  * For [naomichana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/naomichana/gifts).



> I write almost exclusively femmeslash, but I recently discovered that there is *no* Rabbi Yohanan/Resh Lakish slash on here, and given that Bava Metzia 84a is more or less *already* a slashfic, that simply won’t do.
> 
> Many thanks to naomichana--who also lamented the absence of this pairing-- for the beta read!
> 
> Glossary:  
> Beit midrash: house of study  
> Mikveh: ritual bath  
> ben: son of; thus Joseph ben Jacob is Joseph, son of Jacob  
> Amoraim: the rabbis of the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds  
> Hashem: literally "the Name;" a way to refer to God without uttering the Divine Name

**1.** When Shimon ben Lakish, a bandit of no good name, saw a beautiful woman bathing in the Jordan river, he resolved to take her, as he took most other things that pleased him. True, she was on one bank and he on the other, but that posed no great difficulty for a man of Shimon’s physical prowess; to make one’s way by theft and violence, after all, required a certain threshold of strength.

**2.** When he vaulted across the river on his javelin, he was rather startled to discover that the beautiful woman was, in fact, a man.

**3.** A _beautiful_ man. His face was smooth and boyish, his eyes piercing, his lips full and impish and just ever-so-slightly, tartly pursed. His body was smooth-skinned and fleshy, his belly generous and rippling, his skin golden, his hair going to silver, his cheeks red. His graceful hands rested cockily on his ample hips, and he raised a slender eyebrow at Shimon.

At that moment, Shimon felt uncharacteristically shaky, and his strength threatened to leave him.

His grasp slackened, and his javelin fell to the ground, squelching weakly in the Jordan’s mud.

**4.** As it happened, Rabbi Yohanan ben Nappaha was very well aware of his beauty. So proud was he that he would often loiter outside the _mikveh_ so that the women emerging from it would have his image in their minds as they went home to their husbands, newly purified after their days of menstrual separation, and conceive children of comparable pulchritude.

He realized very quickly that he had the other man at a disadvantage. He smirked, and felt a _frisson_ of glee as he saw the bandit squirm.

**5.** Shimon wasn’t used to losing the upper hand, and he gathered his wits about him, intending to save face through mild self-mockery.

“Your beauty for women!” he quipped, rolling his eyes a little for the other man’s benefit.

**6.** Something in the bandit’s tone, or maybe the roll of his eyes, or the quirk of his lips as he spoke, caused Yohanan to look beneath his coarseness and violent manner. Could it be?

Yes. There was a _mind_ there.

Yohanan gazed intently at him, all traces of irony gone from his lovely face.

“ _Your_ strength for the Torah.”

**7.** When Shimon locked eyes with Yohanan, it suddenly seemed impossible to refuse him.

He eventually broke the gaze, and he thought for a moment that all this was foolishness— _me, a Torah scholar? What rot!—_ resolving to make a quick escape. When he took up his rather muddy javelin and made to vault back over the river, however, he happened to catch sight of Yohanan as he bent over to retrieve his tunic from further up the bank.

His strength ran out of him like water.

**8.** Yohanan taught Shimon, and the years that followed proved his initial assessment correct many times over. Shimon’s mind thirstily soaked up all the traditions and arguments with which Yohanan pelted him, and when they broke off from study to eat and sleep, he eagerly awaited their next meeting with an ache that was almost physical.

**9.** The thrill of their intellectual combat far surpassed that of any fight he’d picked during his days as a bandit. Yohanan would lunge at him with an interpretive problem, his wit sharper than any _gladius,_ driving at his heart with no intention of pulling his blade should Shimon’s parry fail. Shimon would deftly leap aside, his size belying his agility, at the very last moment, riposting with his own textual sword and dagger. At first, Yohanan would bat his weapons aside with contemptuous ease, counterattacking with whirling blades, until Shimon was too exhausted to continue. Little by little, though, Shimon’s skill and endurance increased, until one day he bound Yohanan’s blade with an obscure tradition he’d recalled from weeks prior, and forced him to concede. Then the victories came more often, until finally it was the norm for them to battle to a draw, spent and panting.

Thus did Shimon ben Lakish, the bandit, of no good name, become Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish.

**10.** Shimon loved Yohanan, and Yohanan loved Shimon in return, and the thrill of the combat—and the other touches— they shared was of a kind that had little in common with the duties of the marriage bed. Nevertheless, a rabbi was expected to marry and raise a family, and so when Yohanan suggested that Shimon marry his sister, Shimon accepted with alacrity, since in this way he and Yohanan would be bound together through ties of blood.

Their marriage proved fruitful, and Shimon came to love his wife in a way that fit alongside the love he felt for Yohanan without dislodging it.

And so, for a time, they—Shimon and Yohanan, and their wives, and their children—were happy.

**11.** The beginning of the end came, as such beginnings often do, with what seemed like a minor quibble. One morning, for reasons that remain lost to us, when they met in the _beit midrash_ , Shimon and Yohanan were both frayed and snappish.

(Perhaps the fire wouldn’t light on time that day. Perhaps the children, or the grandchildren, had been especially peevish, and denied their elders sufficient sleep. Perhaps Yohanan’s knees ached especially sharply in that morning’s chill—for he was getting on in years, after all—or perhaps his grief for his many lost sons ambushed him that day, as it tended to at times, causing him to snap viciously at anyone around him).

**12.** Whatever the reason, that day Yohanan opened his dispute with Shimon with uncharacteristic venom, startling the other sages. Appropriately, the matter of the day concerned weapons, and Yohanan’s tongue was as sharp as any of the blades under discussion.

“Blades,” cried Yohanan, “are susceptible to impurity from the time they are fired in the furnace!”

**13**. Shimon knew a challenge when he heard one; what’s more, he knew Yohanan was wrong. Nothing had stopped him from countering such errors before with as much force as he liked, and he was irritated with Yohanan’s brashness.

“On the contrary!” he bellowed. “They are susceptible from the time they are quenched in water!

Yohanan, carried away and heedless, retorted waspishly, “Well, a bandit knows his trade!”

The _beit midrash_ fell silent.

**14.** The blade that Yohanan had been driving towards Shimon’s heart for years hit home with a wet thud. A red haze clouded Shimon’s eyes, and he lashed out in agony.

“What benefit, then, did you provide me by bringing me here?” he spat back. “After all, there, too, they called me ‘Rabbi!’”

“I brought you under the wings of the Divine Presence, you ungrateful ass!” Yohanan snarled back at him.

Shimon’s throat closed, and he was sure he could feel his heart shatter. Without a word, he turned on his heel and walked out the door of the _beit midrash_.

**15.** The word spread quickly: Shimon was ill.

Then: Shimon was dying.

And still Yohanan would not soften.

**16.** Shimon’s wife pleaded with her brother to unbend and save her husband’s life.

“Do it for the sake of my children!” she cried.

Yohanan, still smarting, was unmoved. “Leave your fatherless children,” he quoted haughtily from Jeremiah, “for I will rear them.”

Shimon’s wife knew her brother was stubborn and haughty, but even so, she was appalled. “Then do so for the sake of my widowhood, you self-righteous ass!” she retorted. “What kind of monster quotes that verse when my husband and _your lover_ lies dying and you could save him?!”

She thought she might throw _him_ down a well.

“And let your widows trust in Me,” Yohanan quoted the rest of the verse.

“You’re not Hashem, in case you’d forgotten!” she railed at him. “You can’t fix it if he dies, but you could _stop_ him dying!”

Yohanan said no more, and walked out of the room, leaving his sister sobbing bitterly in a boneless heap on the floor.

**17.** That night, Shimon died, the shattered fragments of his heart forevermore buried in a slick of Jordan river mud.

**18.** The enormity of what he had done broke through Yohanan’s cruel hauteur the next day when he came into the _beit midrash_ and saw Shimon’s place empty. All at once, the very foundations of the place seemed to crumble around him.

He burst into tears and fled. Pining, sick, and disgusted with himself, he refused to leave his house for days.

**19.** Eventually, the rest of the sages decided this had gone on too long. They deliberated, finally sending Rabbi Eleazar ben Pedat, a talented and incisive scholar who had risen precipitously within their ranks, to comfort him and bring him out of his grief.

**20.** Eleazar was, truth be told, a bit awed and just a little skittish at the prospect of attending upon the great and ferocious Rabbi Yohanan. Perhaps he was also keen to avoid taking the sort of mortal wound he’d seen Yohanan deal Shimon; in any case he decided, as he entered the house, to pull his blows a little bit.

It was a mistake.

After Eleazar informed Yohanan for the sixth time that there was a tradition that supported his claim, Yohanan erupted.

“Do you mean to come in here and presume to ape the son of Lakish?! If so, you’ve failed _miserably._ When I would assert something, the son of Lakish would come back with not one, not two, but _twenty-four_ problems with what I’d said! _Twenty-four._ And I would respond with twenty-four answers to his objections, and _together,_ through our efforts, the tradition would expand! And you, you obsequious puppy, dare to show yourself in here and say, ‘there is a _baraita_ that supports you?!’ Of _course_ there is! You think I don’t know my arguments are fabulous?! Get out!”

Eleazar didn’t need to be told twice.

**21.** The encounter with Eleazar, a cruel reminder of what he had thrown away, finally broke Yohanan beyond repair. He wandered the town, weaving between his house and Shimon’s, between the _beit midrash_ and the banks of the Jordan where they’d met so long ago.

“Where are you, son of Lakish? Where are you?” he shrieked, over and over, until his voice went hoarse and the last of his reason left him. And still he mouthed, over and over, like a prayer: “Shimon. Shimon. Shimon.”

**22.** “This can’t go on,” Eleazar said to the rest of the sages. “He’s in torment, and he’ll collapse in the middle of the street if something isn’t done.”

The sages, to a man, agreed, and they prayed for mercy for the brilliant sage who’d led them.

**23.** At the time, Yohanan, ragged and filthy, was kneeling in the shallows of the Jordan, wailing soundlessly. The Holy One must have heard the sages’ prayer, for Yohanan, who hadn’t eaten in days and was feeling very lightheaded, fell forward, and made no effort to turn his face toward the air.

And so Rabbi Yohanan ben Nappaha, one of the two greatest sages of the second generation of amoraim, died face down in the mud where the shattered heart of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, his only match, already lay buried.

**24.** You’d think that if today, you wanted to catch a glimpse of Yohanan and Shimon, you’d have to go down to the banks of the Jordan (which is really more of a brook than a river now, and wouldn’t take much effort at all to vault), and perhaps sink your feet in the mud.

You won’t find them there.

But if you open a volume of Talmud and allow its words to draw you in (as Yohanan’s eyes drew Shimon in almost two thousand years ago), if you pay careful attention, you might hear a raucous laugh, or a cutting remark and an equally clever riposte, off to the side of your head. And if you really allow yourself to fall in, you might realize that there’s no bitterness left in those comments.

The swords no longer drive for each others’ hearts.

**Author's Note:**

> I took some artistic license with the circumstances of Rabbi Yohanan’s death for the sake of narrative symmetry, and I’ve obviously filled in my speculations about the characters’ inner monologues, but otherwise this tracks pretty closely with the events in the story of R. Yohanan and Resh Lakish in Babylonian Talmud Bava Metzia 84a.
> 
> The details about Yohanan’s prettiness and the anecdote about him hanging out outside the mikveh are from earlier in that same passage.
> 
> B. Bava Metzia 84a describes R. Yohanan as boyish, beardless, and pretty; B. Berakhot 13b describes him as fat. While I’ve seen scholars treat this as a contradiction, I see no reason why he couldn’t be boyish, pretty, and fat, so I wrote him that way.
> 
> Yohanan is quoting Jeremiah 49:11 to his sister.


End file.
